Tuesday, August 14, 2012

PM's "Crisis Of Confidence" Speech At Iftar Party

On the evening of August 13
at an Iftar party hosted by Ram Vilas Paswan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the diners on the eve of
our Independence Day. This is the full text of the speech to members of
Congress and other secular parties who attended the dinner.

MMS: "Crisis of confidence"

Namaskar on the eve of the 66th Independence day of this great country! This is a special night
for me. Exactly eight years ago, in May 2005, I accepted my appointment as
Prime Minister by Smt. Sonia Gandhi.
I promised you a PM who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and
who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.

During the past eight years I've spoken to you on many occasions about
national concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the government, our nation's
economy, and issues of terrorism and especially black money. But over those
years the subjects of the speeches, the talks, and the press conferences have
become increasingly narrow, focused more and more on what the isolated world of
Delhi thinks is important. Gradually, you've heard more and more about what the
government thinks or what the government should be doing and less and less
about our nation's hopes, our dreams, and our vision of the future.

Few days ago I had planned to speak to you about very important subjects
– energy, terrorism, illegal immigration, black money, corruption, scams, quotas,
unemployment, farmer suicides, rail accidents, airline crisis, Assam violence
and Azad Maidan violence. For the
fiftieth time, I had described the urgency of these problems and laid out a
series of legislative recommendations to my High Command. But as I was
preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has
been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a
nation to resolve any of these problems?

It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper --
deeper than kerosene lines or power shortages, deeper even than secularism or recession.
And I realize more than ever that as PM
I need your help. So I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of India.
I invited to the PMO people from almost every segment of our society --
business and labour, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private
citizens, all represented by five
eminent media personalities. And then I left 7RCR to listen to other Indians,
men and women like you.

It has been an extraordinary five days, and I want to share with you
what I've heard. First of all, I got a lot of personal advice. Let me quote a
few of the typical comments that I wrote down.

This from the Kerala Governor:
"Mr. PM, you are not leading this nation -- you're just managing the
government. Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough
discipline among your disciples. Don't talk to us about politics or the
mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good. Mr.PM,
we're in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears. If you lead, Mr.PM
we will follow."

Many people talked about themselves and about the condition of our
nation.

This from a young woman in Panchkula: "I feel so far from
government. I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power”. And
this from a young man from Chinchpokli: "Some of us have suffered from
recession all our lives. Some people have wasted energy, but others haven't had
anything to waste." And this from religious leader of the Church: "No
material shortage can touch the important things like God's love for us or our
love for one another."

And I like this one particularly from a woman who happens to be the
mayor of a small oil rich Assam town:
"The big-shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you
can't sell anything on Dalal Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else
first."

This kind of summarized a lot of other statements: "Mr. PM, we are confronted with a moral and
a spiritual crisis."

Several of our discussions were on energy, and I have a notebook full
of comments and advice. I'll read just a few. "We can't go on consuming
40% more energy than we produce. When we import oil we are also importing
inflation plus unemployment. We've got to use what we have. The Middle East has
only 5% of the world's energy, but Reliance has 24% of India’s oil." And
this is one of the most vivid statements: "Our neck is stretched over the fence and Bangla Desh has a knife."

And the last that I'll read: "When
we enter the moral equivalent of war, Mr. PM, don't issue us mobile phones."

These few days confirmed my belief in the decency and the strength and
the wisdom of the Indian people, but it also bore out some of my long-standing
concerns about our nation's underlying problems. After listening to the Indian
people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't
fix what's wrong with India. So, I want to speak to you first about a subject
even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now
about a fundamental threat to Indian democracy. I do not mean our political and
civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength
of India, a nation that is at peace this morning everywhere in the world, with
unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the
very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in
the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity
of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is
threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of India. The
confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic
dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the 15th of August.

It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development
as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public
institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very
Constitution of India. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a
link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress.
We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our
own.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit
communities, and our faith in Gandhi, too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what
one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and
consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that
piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no
confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the Indian spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our
country a majority of our people believe that the next two years of UPA will be
worse than the past eight years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote.
The productivity of Indian workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of
Indians to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the
African world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and
for ministers and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or
reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet,
until the murders of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Phoolan
Devi. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were
always just, only to suffer the agony of China. We respected the PMO as a place of honour until the shock of Coalgate.

We remember when the phrase "16
anna sach" was an expression of absolute dependability, until five
years of inflation began to shrink our rupee and our savings. We believed that
our nation's onions were limitless until 2008, when we had to face a growing
dependence on Pakistani aid. The people are looking for honest answers, not
easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics
as usual.

What you see too often in New Delhi and elsewhere around the country is
a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress party
twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful
special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote,
almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a
balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from
everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and
stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can we do? First of all, we must face the truth, and
then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith
in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation.
Restoring that faith and that confidence to India is now the most important
task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Indians.

We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start
walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come
from 10 Janpath, but from every house in India. We ourselves are the same Indians
who just this year won our best Olympic medal haul. In little more than seven
years we've gone from a position of billion dollar reserves to one in which
almost half the dollars we use comes from Dubai, at prices that are going
through the roof.

What I have to say to you now about terrorism, illegal immigrants and
energy is simple and vitally important.

Point one: I am today
setting a clear goal for the terrorism policy of the India. Beginning this
moment, this nation will never use more commandos for VIPs than we did in 1977
-- never. From now on, every new addition to our VIP security will be met by
the VIPs themselves.

Point two: To ensure that we
meet legal immigration targets, I will use my authority to set quotas. I'm announcing
now that for 2012-13 and 2013-14, I will forbid the entry into this country of
one single illegal immigrant more than my party’s goals allow.

Point three: To give us
energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds
and resources in our nation's history to develop India's own alternative
sources of fuel -- from rocks, from water, from dead trees, from unconventional
gas, from the moon.

Point four: To make
absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I
will urge Congress to create a high-powered board which, like the Waqf Board, will have the
responsibility and authority to cut through the red tape, the delays, and the
endless roadblocks to completing key projects.

Our nation must be fair to the poorest among us, so we will increase
aid to needy Indians to cope with rising energy prices. We often think of
conservation only in terms of sacrifice. In fact, it is the most painless and
immediate way of rebuilding our nation's strength. Every watt of power each one
of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more
confidence, that much more control over our own lives.

You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more money in Swiss Banks alone
than several Pakistans. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have
the world's highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force,
with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to
win this war.

I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do
not promise a quick way out of our nation's problems, when the truth is that
the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will
lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure
honesty. And above all, I will act and I
will speak more often.

I will continue to travel this country, to hear the people of India.
You can help me to develop a national agenda for the 2020s. I will listen and I
will act. We will act together. These were the promises I made three years ago,
and I intend to keep them. Little by little we can and we must rebuild our
confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all
the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest
resources -- India's mines and spectrum, India's secular values, and India's
confidence. I have seen the strength of India in the inexhaustible resources of
our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for
a secure nation.

In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it
alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say something good
about our neighbours. With Soniaji’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is
time for us to join hands in India. Let us commit ourselves together to a
rebirth of the Indian spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot
fail.

Thank you and wish you a Happy
Independence Day in advance.

Note: This is a work of fiction and imagination. The speech is rephrased/parodied from the 'Crisis of Confidence' speech by former US president Jimmy Carter which can be read here.

Hot Gas...thats all. If Manmohini Singh is made PM for 100 years in succession, I bet his speech will remain the same as this one, because know what even low intelligent fellas have their occasional flash of brilliance. Here we are talking about a shameless slave, who has done nothing but slavery, for his superiors all his life. Chains that shackle the Slaves are easier to break free, but mental slaves are difficult to go free.

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